Ringwald's first novel a surprise

Because she's a famous actress, and because you still associate her with the classic teen-film trilogy of "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club" and "Pretty in Pink," you start reading Molly Ringwald's fiction debut "When It Happens to You" looking for movie references.

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By RENE RODRIGUEZ

poconorecord.com

By RENE RODRIGUEZ

Posted Nov. 25, 2012 at 12:01 AM

By RENE RODRIGUEZ
Posted Nov. 25, 2012 at 12:01 AM

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Because she's a famous actress, and because you still associate her with the classic teen-film trilogy of "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club" and "Pretty in Pink," you start reading Molly Ringwald's fiction debut "When It Happens to You" looking for movie references.

You expect a more facile, disposable book, because countless actors have written autobiographies and dishy tell-alls and fact-based tales of Hollywood shenanigans. But when you start to think of famous actors who made the leap to novelist, you come up empty.

Ringwald tried nonfiction with last year's "Getting the Pretty Back: Friendship, Family and Finding the Perfect Lipstick," a title that probably scared away more people than it attracted. It was exactly the kind of frivolous, throwaway book you'd expect a celebrity to write.

But Ringwald, 44, was biding her time. While she was raising a family with her second husband (they have three children) and taking on occasional acting jobs (including a recurring role on the ABC Family series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager"), the iconic redhead was learning the discipline required to write fiction, inspired by Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway, whom she cites as her two biggest influences.

The result is a remarkably mature and moving novel, told in interlocking short stories in which characters drop in and out of each other's lives, set around a marriage disintegrated by adultery. Each story is told through the eyes of a different character — a grandmother, a cheating spouse, the mother of a small boy who believes he's a girl — and each is written in a distinct style.

Ringwald says her acting experience was helpful in creating that singularity of voices.

"I think it definitely made it easier," Ringwald says via telephone from her home in Los Angeles. "It was the same thing that interested me the most about acting — the opportunity to get inside different people's heads. I'm surprised there aren't more actors who write fiction, because our job helps us train us for it. But there's this whole other part you have to learn which is incredibly hard and achingly solitary, and most actors, myself included, have always been used to collaborating with other people and the immediate response of an audience. When you're writing, you're sitting there by yourself and putting things together brick by brick, and it's hard. But to hear different voices in your head and knowing when they sound authentic is helpful."

The prevailing themes of "When It Happens to You" are betrayal and forgiveness, and the book carries the wisdom and life experience of someone like Ringwald, who has traveled the world since she was a teen.